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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6042265" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 297: July 2002part 7/10Class acts: Monte finally gives us a spellcasting prestige class that can stand up to a straight spellcaster. The Master of the Secret Sound. Quite a tricky one to get into, your best options are as a straight bard, or a wizard with a couple of levels of rogue, and mastering it before epic levels will require some seriously finicky character building. (bard/ur priest combo for the win again.) However, doing so will be worth it, as it lets you replicate the effects of 9th level spells without the components or costs. Daily Wishes without your XP being drained? Not to be sneezed at. The other characters'll have to do some serious optimizing to keep up with that. It's also generally useful before then because it's effects don't require somatic or material components, so if you're captured and all your stuff taken away, you'll be way more effective than a standard wizard, still able to pull plenty of tricks. So before 10th level, it's a fairly flavorful and balanced class.You'll have to consider carefully if you want to nerf that pinnacle power a bit, so it still requires you to at least pay the XP and expensive material component costs of the spells you replicate. Guild secrets: This looks like it's going to be a regular column for a while, and gets in the themes as well, with a guild that's small because it has fairly stringent entry requirements. On top of that, their entire purpose is making sure only "worthy" people get to epic level, as if it's an in setting conceit rather than just a system one. While that can work in some settings, like the forgotten realms, where the system and setting are pretty tightly integrated, I'm not so sure I want that in my generic D&D. I think it's more the implementation than anything, as they managed to sell Druids only having limited numbers of top guys in earlier editions. But the layout here is just reams of text in not very appealing colour combinations, and the red on brown headers aren't very easy to read. There might be room in D&D for a world spanning organisation that preserves the balance and looks kickass while doing so, but this ain't it, especially as we got a better one just a few articles ago. The editor should have junked this and sent them back to come up with a different idea to prevent rehash within the same issue.</blockquote>

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